‘Silicon Valley’ Season 3, Episode 4: Irrepressible Genius

Season 3, Episode 4: ‘Maleant Data Systems Solutions’

Despite all evidence to the contrary — the infantilized corporate campuses, the venal and pretentious company “visionaries,” the self-aggrandizing talk of changing the world for the better — “Silicon Valley” is secretly a show that loves technology and innovation. It is utterly sincere in supporting the Pied Piper team and the slamming compression platform this socially maladjusted squad wants to unleash upon the world. Scratch that: The platform is just a MacGuffin. It’s the idea of creating something great in the abstract that the show respects. And punishes. Repeatedly.

And so in the ashes of the failed skunkworks scheme last week, Richard, Dinesh and Gilfoyle now resign themselves to the coding drudgery of creating a Pied Piper box for Maleant, under a set of all-too-achievable specs. Yet they’re constitutionally incapable of doing it, because their creativity and ambition cannot be contained in rectangular black-metal housing. As Jared so delightfully phrases it to the engineering team: “You can’t help but be elegant. You’re like Audrey Hepburn.”

With this, we have a metaphor for the creative process that might yield “Silicon Valley” itself, or previous Mike Judge projects like “Office Space” or “Idiocracy,” where his ideas ran so contrary to studio expectations that support for the films were slim to nonexistent. When Jack labels compromise as “the shared hypotenuse of the Conjoined Triangles of Success,” there’s no reason to believe the show’s creators disagree with him. Creative disagreement can lead to productive tension, provided that the artists — or, in this case, the engineers — can’t resign themselves to turning out hackwork. Judge has often been to Hollywood as Richard is to Silicon Valley: constantly bruised by the process of bringing his vision to market. Yet the product is stellar.

In true “Silicon Valley” form, however, the excellence of the box becomes a problem. If the Pied Piper team had merely slapped together the subpar code necessary to meet the base requirements, then stuck it in the design equivalent of a “box turtle,” they’d be clear to work on their compression platform. Instead, the quality of the appliance is so stellar that Jack scores a deal with Maleant too lucrative for Laurie Bream to reject, even when it’s revealed that Maleant will own the rights to the underlying algorithm for five years, crushing Richard’s ultimate goal of working on the platform. Were it not for Monica’s intervention, combined with the blind luck of Gavin Belson inadvertently giving huge market value to a rival platform, Richard’s dream would be dead. And it would be his irrepressible genius that killed it.

“Maleant Data Systems Solutions” is a surprisingly deep consideration of integrity in the face of compromise. Richard has no patience for the weird slide show his designer unveils in an effort to “develop a shared aesthetic vocabulary,” but when the designer comes back with a featureless black shell, it offends him. “Are you just going to do the bare minimum and call it a day?,” he asks. The world is full of Action Jack types, who have the power to force creative people to work within the confines of a puny imagination, and Richard and the gang gripe about it constantly, as they should. But as Dinesh says, “Just because making the box sucks doesn’t mean we have to suck at making it.”

Still, that doesn’t stop the Pied Piper team from fighting the good fight or the writers of “Silicon Valley” from getting a laugh out of the inevitability of failure. Monica taking a stand against the Maleant deal seemed likely to cost her a board seat and possibly her job, just for Laurie to replace her with somebody who will approve the deal anyway. Everything Jared does in this episode is hilarious, but his hushed admiration for Monica’s quixotic stand is a particular highlight:

“What you did took incredible guts. The fact that it probably won’t make a difference makes it all the more meaningful. I saw this nature documentary where a bison fought a lion to protect the rest of the herd. And it was so moving. It didn’t work: The lion tore into the bison and laid waste to the herd. But what courage!”

In the end, “Maleant Data Systems Solutions” hands Richard and the gang a rare victory, insofar as facing a reinvigorated Hooli with fewer resources and without a C.E.O. can count as a victory. Action Jack is gone and his Conjoined Triangles of Success are now back to being a business-school abstraction, rather than a real-world corporate torture device. Laurie has given them the go-ahead to work on the platform. Their company could be valued as high as $250 million. For now, they’re winners. Soon, no doubt, we’ll learn more about the hidden costs of success.

Bytes

• Another great Jared episode this week. His zeal for problem solving and organization, his indefatigable good cheer in the face of adversity, and his almost maternal pride in the company are sweet, pathetic and comical all at once. Resigned to sleeping in Erlich’s garage on a semi-permanent basis, Jared takes a proactive attitude about the rat droppings around his cot: “I was thinking maybe we could just pick a day and just drench it in hawk urine, because the scent of a predator can keep rodents at bay.”

• Richard’s faceplant on Jack’s desk is the banana peel at the end of an uncharacteristically shrewd power play. For more displays of Thomas Middleditch’s talent for physical comedy, I recommend this brief Instagram video with his improv partner Ben Schwartz, who is best known as Jean-Ralphio of “Parks and Recreation.” I can’t, however, recommend “Search Party,” the long-delayed project co-starring T. J. Miller that slipped into a few theaters and video on demand over the weekend.

• Big Head finally comes into the picture with an inadvertent challenge to Erlich’s “incubator” model, and the contrast between Big Head’s easygoing vacuousness and Erlich’s territorial aggression is already paying comic dividends. At this point, Big Head has become like Peter Sellers’s “Chauncey Gardener” in “Being There,” a blank slate who reads as a font of wisdom. The more Erlich respects his adversary’s game, the funnier it gets.

• Gavin wheeling in a bulldog to demonstrate the corporate “inbreeding” that resulted in Nucleus is another inspired touch. “A kindly pet or humanity’s cruelest mistake?”

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